305. The Fastest Way to Make More Money (The Future is Focus Series)

Speaker A: M this Future Is Focused summer series is powered by Squarespace Circle, the free partner program and professional community for creatives who build client websites on Squarespace. If you're building sites for clients and you're not in circle, you're probably leaving money and support on the table. Referral commissions, extended trials, discounts, early access to betas and new features. Priority support. All of it. The link to sign up is in the show notes@nobsmastery.com podcast. But to make it super simple, I put together a free guide that walks you through exactly how to join, set up your referral commissions and quickly start earning passive income from websites you're already building. Grab that at, uh, nobsmastery.com squarespace the link is in the show notes. Okay, let's get into it. Everybody wants more ease and less overwhelm in their business. And the key to that is simplifying. Because obviously when you have fewer things to juggle, you're going to feel less overwhelmed. It's as simple as that. So if everybody wants a simpler business, why does almost nobody have one? The reason it's so hard to simplify your business is because simplifying requires something that most entrepreneurs don't genuinely struggle with. Saying no to a lot of things they actually want to do. So that's what this episode is about. And that's what this whole summer series is about. Welcome to the no BS Mastery Podcast. For experts and consultants ready to charge more, profit more, and deliver faster, this is your permission slip to build a Freedom first business without employees. All you have to do is cut the bs. I am M. Pia Silva. If you've got a, uh, never ending to do list somewhere that you're constantly referencing but always scared to look at if you have another list somewhere of all the ideas that you've been keeping that you can't wait to look at once you have more time. If you find yourself often overwhelmed and yet not very productive because you have so much, so many things that you could and want to do. But when you have a block of time to work, you're not sure where you should put your energy first. Those are all indicators that your business is too complicated to run. And let me take you back to the first time that I really learned the incredible freedom that I got once I realized how complicated our business had gotten and how immediately I felt the results of simplifying. So for the first three years of our business, we were doing whatever we could to bring clients and money in. And that meant that we were trying all sorts of things. I was networking a ton. I was offering free proposals, free meetings, pitches to anyone and everyone who would listen, and we were pitching all kinds of projects. Every proposal that I wrote for a, uh, prospect had to be adjusted and customized specifically for them. We were constantly making and upgrading decks because sometimes a prospect would say, oh, I'm interested in working with you. Can you send me your deck? And all of a sudden, Steve and I would go, we don't have a deck. And we would go make one. I was open to taking clients that needed any of our services at many points in those first few years because we needed the money. And how that played out in my life was that every single day, I woke up just completely overwhelmed by all the things that I could be doing with no idea where I should actually focus my time. So I filled up my calendar with stuff to do. And in retrospect, a lot of the things that I spent my time doing wasn't getting me anywhere. For example, even though I was doing a ton of networking, because what I was saying was all over the place, because I was a generalist and I would do any project for any kind of client, even though I was putting in so much effort to get in the rooms and get in front of people, when I said what I did, a lot of the times the other person just didn't even really register it. It didn't create an impression. It didn't necessarily get them to think of me when they were in front of my ideal client, because, frankly, they didn't know who my ideal client was. And neither did I. Every project we did close required so much time and management from me because every project was so different. The timeline was different, every CL was different. The way that they would interact with us and how reliable they were to show up to, uh, our meetings and all kinds of things. So my point is, I felt like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off all the time with no clear plan. I had no idea how we were going to make our next sale. And I felt like that for three years. Cut to March of 2014. We're in a really bad financial situation. We have to let our employees go. We have to rent. Consider everything that we're doing, and we pare our whole business down to just three offers. We focus all in on the lead product, which is the first paid step that I now teach to everyone on this podcast, in my book and in all of my programs that as the only first step to working with us. So I was actually only selling that One thing. And then on the back end we had two offers at that time. We had a one day intensive for $3,000 and a two day intensive for $5,000. All of a sudden it was like the clouds parted. Because what went from, we can work with anyone, we can do all kinds of design work, we can do websites, we'll build anything for anyone, any size. Went down to, hey, we work with one to three person service businesses and we do this one and two day intensive model. That's it. We build brands and websites in these intensives. So all of a sudden it went from kind of confusing and chaotic and all over the place generalist to super clear. And not only, of course, does that clarity of message and offering make it much easier for people that you're talking to to understand who you work with and who they could refer to you and you know, makes them think of you when they encounter that, that kind of, um, client for you. But it cut out all, I mean, 90% of the BS that I was juggling up until that point. And this happened, you know, overnight, basically, you know, over a couple of weeks. Imagine this. Just think of the difference in how I was operating every day before March of 2014 and after. Before March of 2014, every time I had a new prospect, the process for even trying to close them was very long. And I was kind of making it up and tweaking it. Every time I did it, I was having however many meetings I had to have in order to get to a place where I felt like I could write this proposal. The number of meetings changed every time. Right. Sometimes I had to go in and actually meet them in person. Sometimes it was just one conversation, then we would do the proposal. And that proposal, of course, we used previous proposals as a template, but I had had to adjust all the details in every proposal. And these propos were really thoughtfully written. They were long, they were 30 page PDFs that had example projects that we had done that we felt lined up with the kind of projects that that client was asking for because I wanted to show them work that was relevant to them. So every single time I wrote one of these proposals, I usually was asking Steve to update the case studies in the deck because I was always going to be a new client that we wanted to show off or that was more aligned. I'm editing all of the details in the proposal. We don't know how long this proposal process is going to go on. Right. We don't have any control over it. So we're giving the proposal to the client. And then we may have many more meetings, we may not hear back from them. And now I am, um, sending follow up emails and I'm chasing them down over weeks. I literally may never hear back. Or when I do, I may have to go in for another meeting. So this is before we've even gotten paid. That's what pitching looked like before we made this simplified move. After I would have a conversation with someone and I would tell them the next step is the brand shrink. This is what it is, this is how much it costs, period. Nothing else. Right? So I just immediately cut out all of that unknown and took all of that off my to do list. Okay, now let's compare the actual project before we made this pivot. As soon as the project contract was signed, I would receive a deposit and we would get to work. And uh, we would be doing step one of 20, right? We would be doing the first step. For us, it was doing the mood boards and getting ready for the first presentation that was going to be in a couple of weeks. And even that experience felt like we were going into a wide open field because we had a general plan for what the steps were going to be in this project. But every single step, you know, 20 different steps to get us from beginning to end of different things that we would have to build and then show the client and then get their feedback and then do the revisions process and wait until that revisions process was completed before we moved to the next step. And we had to do that a dozen times. So even though I would try to put together really tight timelines, there was so much unknown in that process that I couldn't control. I didn't know at every single step how many times a client would need to me to make a change before we moved forward. Even if I had written in the document that they got three revisions, you know, something like that. So no matter how much I tried to control it, because every project was different, the timeline was never set in stone. I could never have put actual dates for every single deliverable into the calendar because there were things that were out of my control. Not to mention throughout this process I am generating invoices to get paid to, you know, our second and third and fourth and maybe fifth payment for this project and each of those payment requests. Sometimes it wasn't that difficult to get paid, but it was often a whole process, right. I had to generate the invoice and send it. And then if I didn't get the payment quickly, then I would have to follow up. Maybe I'm looking for the check. At this point, it's not that any one of these things is so time consuming, it's that all of these things compounded become very time consuming. Okay, let's compare that to right after we made this simplified switch. Once we went all in on these one and two day intensives, the process was super clear. We did the brand shrink, we did our lp, we had the plan, they said yes to the one or the two day whatever I suggested, and then we sat down, got to work, we did the whole project up front and then we just met with them for that day or the two days and we finished it. So we got paid upfront. None of all these loose threads, all of these open loops, these unknowns. There was nothing to thwart us. Just imagine how many things on my to do list every day got eliminated overnight through simplification. That feeling of what do I do every day? Went away almost immediately. The overwhelm lifted. And it lifted because there were genuinely way fewer things that I had to do to deliver on these projects and to pitch these prospects. But it also lifted the overwhelm because there was a huge, uh, mental load that I was carrying just by having these infinite options, all the possibilities of what I needed to do every day. And there were so many unknowns that created more possibilities. Every interaction I had with the client required so many decisions. If you ever find yourself spending a lot of time writing emails to a client, trying to adjust because of things that pop up or questions that you weren't anticipating, or scheduling conflicts, all of those things end up taking an incredible amount of mental energy to deal with. And that is where so much of this overwhelm comes from. Not only that, my marketing efforts got so much easier Now I just had one clear thing to say, one clear thing for people to remember and refer to me. One clear answer to what do you do? Who do you work with? Something that I could say confidently and clearly. Now, I knew that any room I walked into, I was going to walk out with referral opportunities and clients. Because the difference between standing up in a room and saying, I work with small businesses and I help them with their brands and I help them stand out. And saying, I work with one to three person service businesses and build badass brands in one to two day intensives, right? Cuts through the noise, cuts through the crap, makes people perk their ears up and go, how do you do that? I want to hear more. So that's how this no BS business model was born. It was born out of a, uh, Relief for me, having lived in that overwhelm for years. Now, I want to point out a couple of things. One is that I was not the hero. I did not have this epiphany myself. I had this epiphany out of need, right? I was forced into a corner and forced to sit down and make some hard decisions. And until I was forced into that corner, I was on a very different path. I was building what I thought was a big agency, a big, shiny, fancy agency, because I had an association with big agency employees. All of that with success. And until I was in a corner where I had to make a different decision because I simply could not afford to continue the way I was going, I probably would have continued on that overwhelming path for a much longer time. So this came out of need. And I want to share that for two reasons. One is that I think the reason that people have a hard time simplifying is because it's actually a harder choice. I think that we hold an underlying assumption that complicated means sophisticated. I think we think more options mean more opportunities, and we wear that badge of busyness, uh, with pride because it sounds like we're productive. But what we really need to remember is that none of those things are actually true. The paradox at the center of this episode is that closing off opportunities, if that's how you want to look at it, actually is the fastest way to make more money. So closing off opportunities, for example, by not saying, I work with everyone, but owning a certain kind of audience, a very specific target market, will make you more money in less time, no question. But that feels counterintuitive because it feels like, well, if I'm talking to somebody who could hire me and I tell them I work with somebody else, I'm going to lose that opportunity. You may lose that opportunity anyway, but you will gain the opportunity of pulling the right clients towards you by owning that audience. If you don't want to focus what you offer, you have 15 different things that you could possibly do for someone. Well, that means that your marketing is going to have to explain all 15 things. Or worse, it's going to explain nothing. Because you want to leave yourself open to the possibility that you could deliver 15 different things. Not only is that complicated and hard to understand for your audience, but that's also your brain having to hold all these different things in it, and that's your clients having to choose between all this, these things on the menu, and nobody wins. Just think about it this way. When you go to a diner with their huge menu and you can literally have anything. What do you order? I think the majority of us know what we order at a diner, right? We've got like two things that we're going to order. We don't need or want to look at that menu. It's too overwhelming. We have been to enough diners to know, you know, for me, it's the. It's the burger and fries or the turkey club. Those are two good diner foods in my eyes. I don't even want to look at the menu because it's too overwhelming. And yet when we're offering our services, we have this desire to say, hey, look at all the things I could possibly do for you. And it's too much. When you only have a couple of clear things, everything gets easier. Your marketing gets clearer, your delivery gets faster, because now you're delivering the same thing over and over again. And your referrals are going to come more easily. And all of this is going to increase your confidence, because if you've done the same thing over and over and over again, if you're saying the same clear, focused message over and over and over again, you will become genuinely excellent at that, and that builds confidence. Now, another reason this is hard is because when you are an entrepreneur, you are by definition, a creative thinker. That's an amazing quality. That's what makes you a great entrepreneur. But creative thinkers have lots of ideas, and saying no to your own good ideas is genuinely really hard. If you've ever heard the phrase kill your darlings, it means when writers need to edit out their own writing. And it's very hard to do because when you've written something, you understand why it's important. Often I've had to edit things out of emails out of my book that I feel very strongly about. And I have to make the hard decision that by including it, it's actually muddying the message. It's the same thing in business. You are going to be attached to all your ideas, all the offers you've built, all the skills that you've acquired. You see all the possibilities. And you may also feel like, I can help everyone. And I want to. To simplify is to start saying, I am not going to do 90% of these things. I am not going to say 90% of these ideas, and I'm going to focus on this 10%. And the fear under that is, what if I choose the wrong 10%? Or what if I simplify down to the wrong thing? And I think that fear is what keeps people paralyzed in just staying in complexity because at least when things are complex and you have, uh, lots of different options, it can feel like you're covering all the bases and it can feel like you're leaving open all of the opportunities. And especially, especially if you're in scarcity mode. Scarcity mode, by the way, doesn't mean you're not making money. I watch people who are making lots of money in scarcity mode because I can see it when they're working all the time, their roster is full of client work and their scarcity mode is showing when they won't take a step back and take some of that time away from their paid client work to do their business development, to keep their pipeline full because they feel like it's a money grab. I need to work with these clients and get as much money as I can right now. Again, paradoxically, it means that they don't put the time into building their pipeline so that they'll have clients in the future too. So a lot of this move to simplicity is very hard for complex thinkers, creative thinkers who don't want to make the wrong decision and simplify and narrow down to the wrong thing. But if you want more profit, more freedom, more and more ease, the path 100% is to simplify and focus. Now here is, I think, an important reframe that I must point out. Having a complicated business doesn't mean that you did something wrong. It's actually a normal part of the business cycle. I've been in business for over 15 years and I have gone through periods of complexity and then simplifying, and it's actually feels a little bit like maybe your kitchen drawers. Right? It's like every once in a while you clear everything out, you get rid of all the items that you don't really use. Everything looks neat and tidy. And then over time, it starts to get messy again. You start to bring in a couple of extra tools and, you know, the cabinets and the drawers are overflowing again. And every once in a while you have to take a step back, look at everything and pare it down again. And I find that business is the same because as we grow our businesses, we will always be having new ideas. And some of those ideas should be put into practice. So you might have a great marketing idea, you might want to try something new, and you're going to do that with lots of things as you should. And the result of that eventually is that you will add a bunch of new things that you're trying and your business will be complex again. So rather than feel like, oh, My goodness, I did the wrong thing and I made my business really complicated. I would rather look at it as you are in a cycle where you have grown your complexity and now it is time to pare it down. And this is part of what business owners do. They try things, they build up a bunch of different assets, they build up a bunch of different tests, they get a lot of data, and then every once in a while, they take a step back and they pare it down. And that is the part that separates you from all the other business owners, because a lot of business owners never take that time to step back and pare it down. They just live in the overwhelm. They just live in the complexity. And I've watched business owners live in that complexity for decades. You know, people who never take the time to take a step back and look at the whole business and say, oh, my goodness, I'm selling 10 things. But actually, these two are the only things that are profitable that I like doing. If we only did this, we would be incredibly successful. Why are we doing these, like, 80% of these things? You've heard the 80, 20 rule. 80% of your profit is usually going to come from about 20% of your efforts. So this is your reminder to take the summer to start rethinking how you want to focus. The goal is not to achieve simplicity once and think that it's going to be done forever. The goal is to recognize when it's time to do that clean out and then to have that muscle to actually do it. I think one of the most consistent patterns that I've noticed over the last 15 years is that businesses thrive when the owner gets good at recognizing the cycle and gets in a habit of pruning on purpose, especially when they start to feel overwhelmed. And this focus can look a lot of different ways. I remember when we decided to go all in on building our websites on Squarespace, because before that we were platform agnostic and we would take on any website that anybody needed because we could always bring in a developer if we didn't know how to do it. But that was so much complexity for us, because any project, even if it felt like a bigger project, if we had to then bring in a development team to build on WordPress for us, and then we had to manage that team, and then we had to manage how they wouldn't put our designs exactly as we gave them, and we had to manage the client working with the dev team. And all of that also meant that we were responsible for the dev team doing a Good job. This is just one example of how there was so much complexity in us having that as an option in our offers. The second we said, you know what, we're just going to go all in on Squarespace, that is going to eliminate our need to bring in other developers, which is already a headache I would love to avoid. And it's going to mean, yeah, we're going to talk to prospects who are going to want their website on WordPress, and I'm going to say no. That's the scary prospect. That's the thing most people don't want to do, saying no to a client who wants to hire you because they want it to be on WordPress and you only work on Squarespace. But the mindset shift is I just avoided a project that was going to take a lot of time and energy and give me a lot of overwhelm, and all of that space can be redirected to finding my next Squarespace client, my next client that. That understands that we only build on Squarespace and they want that. And not only did that simplify finding clients even more, because it was immediately apparent who was a good fit for us or not, but we got so good at Squarespace that every website was faster and faster to build. So rather than, you know, only a third of our websites being on Squarespace and another third being on WordPress and another third being on, you know, some other platform, Shopify. Simplifying down to one platform made our lives so much easier. So imagine if you looked at all the elements of what you deliver and how you deliver and who you deliver them to, and you narrowed it down like we did with Squarespace. You narrowed down the platform, the process, the offer, the prices, the market. That's how you go from, oh, my gosh, I'm so overwhelmed. There's a million things I could do and I'm not sure what to do today because they're all important to, we don't do this, we don't do that, we don't do that. So this is what I'm going to do today. This is what I'm going to say. This is where I'm going to go. This is what I'm going to offer. And I know that anyone who doesn't fall into this very neat and simple business model of mine isn't a good fit. And that is incredibly liberating. So here's what I want you to do. Over the next two months, I am going to be talking about different ways to simplify. I'm going to talk more about the entrepreneur brain problem and why you can't perfect things before you actually do them, the power of specializing in one thing, why personal connection is still the most reliable marketing strategy, and how to really focus in on one marketing strategy that's going to keep your pipeline full. I'll talk about the importance of giving ideas a real chance and how a lot of people jump ship before things can actually even have a chance to work. And I'll break down the no BS business model, which is so simple that anyone selling expertise can do it and when you do, it can completely change your business and how you relate to your business because you will no longer feel that overwhelm. All of these aren't separate ideas, they're all expressions of the same thing. That focus is the strategy, not hustle, not more, more, more. Not complexity as a badge of honor or busyness as a badge of honor, simplicity and focus. The future really isn't about more, more, more. It's about focusing. So do me a favor, do a couple of things. Subscribe if you haven't already so you don't miss these episodes in this series. Share this with someone that you know feels overwhelmed running their expert business because they're going to want to hear this too. This is going to get you guys in the mindset of simplifying and if this is already resonating with you and you want help doing this inside your own business, go to no bsmastery.com program simplifying for yourself is so hard and that's why no BS Mastery exists. I have a really simple business model that I have taught to thousands of small expert based businesses over the years. It's so simple that when my students implement it, they often say to me, I can't believe I didn't realize I could do this. And yet it's very hard to do for yourself. Nobsmastery.com program and for those of you who are my designers and you're building on Squarespace, make sure you go to nobsmastery.com squarespace and grab the free guide that I made for you that walks you through how to set yourself up on Squarespace Circle. You should be getting referral commissions every single month and it's really quick to start earning passive income from websites you're already building. Go to no b-masterry.com squarespace that's all I've got for you today. I will talk to you next week. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll be back next week with more strategies and tips on how to grow your expert led business so you can achieve more profit, freedom and ease. The no BS Agency podcast is produced by Yellow House Media Coordinator is Lou Blaser. This episode is edited by Marty Seifelt, creative direction by Sean and Tara McMullen. Our theme music is Knock Em down by the Shrugs.